The present embodiments relate to electronic devices and are more particularly directed to updating (i.e., modifying) embedded firmware in a video system.
Electronic devices are extremely prevalent and beneficial in today's society and are constantly being improved due in part to consumer and user demand. Various technological examples exist in the video industry including devices such as digital video disk (“DVD” or “digital versatile disk”) players, digital video recorders, television displays, monitors, and so forth. Many of these systems include complex embedded system firmware to control various operations of the video system and its video processing. As complexity has increased, so has the need for possibly changing the firmware code after a device is developed or even after it has entered into marketplace. The reason(s) dictating the desired change may vary. For example, there is the possibility of programming errors (so-called “bugs”) in the firmware code and, arguably, this possibility increases with device and firmware complexity. As another example, a system may be released with a version of firmware that supports certain functionality, while thereafter it is determined that the system hardware could support additional desired functionality were a change to the firmware code made possible. Indeed, as video devices tend more recently to utilize operating systems, there is an increase in both capability as well as complexity. As still another example, with market forces often driving an expedited schedule to place a product into the marketplace, there is the chance that firmware-supported features may be incomplete or missing or may not have been fully tested prior to entering the marketplace. In all of these situations, therefore, it may be desirable to change or update the embedded system firmware so as to address the corresponding situation.
According to the prior art, there are various manners for updating embedded system firmware. As one example, in personal computers and some electronic devices, a digital interface may exist to download (or “flash”) new code into the system firmware. Such an interface may be by way of a Universal Serial Bus (“USB”) or Ethernet connection. As another example, some contemporary DVD players and DVD recorders permit an update to the device's embedded system firmware by loading a DVD into the device's DVD drive, so that new firmware code on a DVD in the drive may be read and copied to the device's embedded system firmware code, thereby achieving the update. While the preceding approaches work in those described devices, other devices may not include such connectivity or readable drives, where indeed these items often are not included for reasons such as reducing device complexity and cost Thus, for these latter devices, an update to firmware may require a complex approach, such as disassembling the device by a skilled practitioner. In a consumer application, therefore, the device often must be returned to the manufacturer or otherwise delivered to an appropriate technician. As a result, often an update that might prove desirable is not performed due to the resource costs that would accompany the complex steps needed to perform that update.
As a result of the preceding, there arises a need to address the drawbacks of the prior art as is achieved by the preferred embodiments described below.